​​Philosophy, Medicine, and Bodies: The Making of Cultural Consciousness in the Islamic World (Student Essay) -- Second Runner-up

Philosophy—as a science and a worldview—occupies a prominent place in Islamic intellectual history, contributing to a tradition of robust inquiry in its practice of ongoing reassessment of core metaphysical principles and its influence on the disciplines of theology, legal theory, and jurisprudence. It informs the method of several important philosophical theologians from a variety of doctrines such that it could be said that differences in Sunni and Shiite thought are not always as pronounced as might seem, and that the rigorous debate around metaphysic al issues likewise contributes to a certain porousness between schools of thought and their theories of being. Whilst both doctrinal and philosophical differences did of course exist, the philosophical tradition taken as awhole reveals a rich lineage of interrogation, adoption, and cross-pollination stretching from Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) to IbnʿArabī (d. 1240), to Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274) and beyond, all of whom held various views on the issues of the soul, consciousness, and science—the latter having forwarded a basic theory for the evolution of species almost 600 years before Charles Darwin was born.

The Sunni Ash’arī tradition is represented by a chain of theological philosophers and texts running from al-Ghazālī’s al-Iqtiṣād fī al-Iʿtiqād to Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s (d. 1209) Kitāb al-Arba ʿīn fī Uṣūl al-Dīn, followed by al-Taftāzānī’s Sharḥ al-Aqā id al Nasafiyya , and Muhammad bin Yusuf al-Sanūsī’s (d. 1490) ʿAqīda. The Shiite tradition, meanwhile, draws largely from Muʿtazilī kalām and Ibn Sīnan thought. As theology developed in the classical period, especially following al-Ghazālī, there occurred cross-pollination between traditions and much Sunni thought began to incorporate philosophy of the Avicennian and Aristotelian varieties. Some fought against these influences while others embraced them. There was difference of opinion amongst the scholars about diverse issues such as the nature of the human soul (whether it is part of the body or not, whether it is material or immaterial, etc.), religious tradition (whether bodily resurrection was true or just allegorical), and causation (e.g. there was difference of opinion whether diseases were contagious or not).

Central to all of these issues, yet seldom made apparent, is the human body. It is the body as the node between the microcosmic and macrocosmic worlds that allows for consciousness and the understanding of the self as well as the environs around it. Whatever philosophy may claim in the realm of metaphysics, the medical tradition is thoroughly empirical in its methodology, with inquiries into the nature of the body being firmly grounded in observation and experience. The guiding question for this paper, therefore, is to explore how evolution in concepts about the body in philosophy and medicine Influence the law and society , thereby also having an impact on the trajectory of Islamic history and culture. This paper argues that the disciplines of philosophy and medicine, inasmuch as they converge on the body as their object and source of study, inform each other epistemologically and thus contribute to the making of a new consciousness and culture.